Abstract
Within a year from 1927 to 1928, a minor flurry of press coverage documented two occasions in which three Mexican Boy Scouts walked from Mexico City to New York City. This isolated and seemingly incidental set of events illuminated the complex intersections of Mexican cultural nationalism and modern transnational youth identity. The phenomenon illustrates the disjuncture between how young people growing up in Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s envisioned themselves, how they translated and exported that vision abroad, and how other countries like the United States continued to view them. The overlapping national, global, and youth identities expressed by the Boy Scout protagonists of this history perfectly capture the imperfect — indeed, often confusing — relationships between local, national, and transnational identities that concern historians.
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Notes
P-Y. Saunier (2013) Transnational History: Theory and History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), p. 7.
D. Thelen (1999) ‘The Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States History’, The Journal of American History, 86 (3), The Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States History: A Special Issue, 965–75;
L. Briggs, G. McCormick, and J. T. Way (2008) ‘Transnationalism: A Category of Analysis’, American Quarterly, 60 (3), 637.
M. Bucholz (2002) ‘Youth and Cultural Practice’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 31, 525.
C. A. Bayly, S. Beckert, M. Connelly, I. Holmeyr, W. Kozol, and P. Seed (2006) ‘AHR Conversation: On Transnational History’, The American Historical Review, 111 (5), 1444.
W. Hillcourt (1992) Baden-Powell: The Two Lives of a Hero (New York: Gilwellian Press).
B. Sundmark (2009) ‘Citizenship and Children’s Identity in The Wonderful Adventures of Nils and Scouting for Boys’, Children’s Literature in Education, 40, 117–18.
K. Alexander (2009) ‘The Girl Guide Movement and Imperial Internationalism during the 1920s and 1930s’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 2 (1), 37–63;
T. Parsons (2009) ‘The Limits of Sisterhood: The Evolution of the Girl Guide Movement in Colonial Kenya’ in N. R. Block and T. M. Proctor (eds) Scouting Frontiers: Youth and the Scout Movement’s First Century (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishers), pp. 143–56.
See Alexander, ‘The Girl Guide Movement’, 37–63. Among others, see: Block and Proctor (eds) Scouting Frontiers; J. Mechling (2001) On My Honor: Boy Scouts and the Making of American Youth (Chicago: The University ol Chicago Press);
T. H. Parsons (2004) Race, Resistance and the Boy Scout Movement in British Colonial Africa (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press).
S. Mintz (2008) ‘Reflections on Age as a Category of Historical Analysis’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 1 (1), 91–4;
L. Paris (2008) ‘Through the Looking Glass: Age, Stages, and Historical Analysis’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 1 (1), 106–13.
K. E. Bliss and A. S. Blum (2007) ‘Dangerous Driving: Adolescence, Sex, and the Gendered Experience of Public Space in Mexico City’ in W. E. French and K. E. Bliss (eds) Gender, Sexuality, and Power in Latin America since Independence (Lanham: Rowman & Littlelield Publishers), pp. 165–6.
E. J. Albarrán (2015) Seen and Heard in Mexico: Children and Revolutionary Cultural Nationalism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press).
A notable exception is J. Reed (1914; repr. 1969) Insurgent Mexico (New York: International Publishers).
M. Tenório-Trillo (1999) ‘Stereophonic Scientific Modernisms: Social Science between Mexico and the United States, 1880s–1930s’, The Journal of American History, 86 (3), The Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States History: A Special Issue, 1179–80.
A similar process, the tension between ‘play’ and ‘real’ Indians in the United States, is addressed in P. J. Deloria (1998) Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press).
Two years earlier, Explorer leaders hosted the First National Congress ol Explorers (Primer Congreso Nacional de Exploradores), but the 1928 conference distinguished itself by its marked nationalism, established in part by the slight change of the name of the organization to include references to ‘tribes’ and ‘Mexico’. See Tihui n. 1, December 1926, 14–15. J. U. Escobar (1928) Informe del Trabajo de las Tribus de Exploradores Mexicanos (México: Talleres Gráficos de la Nación), pp. 5–6.
F. Clarck (1921) El Explorador Mexicano (México: Asociación de Exploradores Mexicanos).
AGN, O-C 816-E-17; ‘Oficina de Acción Social’, Memoria de la Secretaria de Educación Pública, Tomo II (México: Secretaria de Educación Pública, 1938–1939), pp. 315–17.
R. Pérez-Montfort (2003) ‘El estereotipo del indio en la expresión popular urbana, 1920–1940’, Estampas de Nacionalismo Popular Mexicano: Diez Ensayos Sobre Cultura Popular y Nacionalismo, 2nd edn (México: CIESAS), p. 183.
J. U. Escobar (1929) Las Tribus de Exploradores Mexicanos (México: Silbarios de la SEP).
In the northeast of the United States during the first decades of the twentieth century, the Camp Fire Girls promoted a nativist aesthetic in the girls’ uniforms (a simple vest adorned with colored beads that corresponded to the different ‘honors’ or duties that the girls completed). The girls also received ceremonial names derived from indigenous languages. S. A. Miller (2007) Growing Girls: The Natural Origins of Girls’ Organizations in America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press), pp. 14–23.
J. Hershfield (2008) Imagining the Chica Moderna: Women, Nation, and Visual Culture in Mexico, 1917–1936 (Durham: Duke University Press), p. 11.
I explore the phenomenon of the ‘proletarian child’ as a national trope in E. J. Albarrán (forthcoming 2015) ‘El niño proletario: Jesús Sansón Flores and the New Revolutionary Redeemer, 1935–1938’ in S. Neufeld and M. Matthews (eds) Mexico in Verse (Tucson: University of Arizona Press).
AGN, O-C 816-E-17, 1921, 6. Mexico aspired to a standard of modernity accelerated in 1920s Germany, which branded civilization and progress on the gendered bodies of its youth on display. See E. N. Jensen (2010) Body by Weimar: Athletes, Gender, and German Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press).
H. Payson (1914) The Boy Scouts under Tire in Mexico (New York: A. L. Burt Company), 91. See also F. B. Deering (n/d) Border Boys with the Mexican Rangers, Border Boys Series (New York: A. L. Burt Company).
C. Beals, ‘Those Mexicans’, Junior Red Cross Journal, VIII (4), December 1931, 80.
C. Beals, ‘Going to School in Mexico’, Junior Red Cross Journal, VIII (9), May 1932, 198.
A. M. Upjohn, ‘Manuel of Mexico’, Junior Red Cross Journal, VII (2), October 1930, 38.
The Three Caballeros (1944), Dir. Norman Ferguson, Prod. Walt Disney, Walt Disney Productions.
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Albarrán, E.J. (2015). Boy Scouts under the Aztec Sun: Mexican Youth and the Transnational Construction of Identity, 1917–40. In: Jobs, R.I., Pomfret, D.M. (eds) Transnational Histories of Youth in the Twentieth Century. The Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137469908_3
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